A few years ago the first volume coming out of the Fundamentalism
Project landed on my desk. The Fundamentalism Project was generously funded
by the MacArthur Foundation and chaired by Martin Marty, the distinguished
church historian at the University of Chicago. While a number of very
reputable scholars took part in it, and although the published results are of
generally excellent quality, my contemplation of this first volume evoked in
me what has been called an Aha! experience.

Now, the book was very big. Sitting there on my desk, massively, it
was of the "book-weapon" type, the kind with which one could do
serious injury. So I asked myself: Why would the MacArthur Foundation pay out
several million dollars to support an international study of religious
fundamentalists? Two answers came to mind. The first was obvious and not very
interesting: The MacArthur Foundation is a very progressive outfit; it
understands fundamentalists to be anti-progressive; the Project, then, was a
matter of knowing one's enemies. The second was a more interesting
answer: So-called fundamentalism was assumed to be a strange,
difficult-to-understand phenomenon; the purpose of the Project was to delve
into this alien world and make it more understandable.

But here came another question: Who finds this world strange, and to
whom must it be made understandable? The answer to that question was easy:
people to whom the officials of the MacArthur Foundation normally talk, such
as professors at American elite universities. And with this came the Aha!
experience: The concern that must have led to this Project was based on an
upside-down perception of the world. The notion here was that so-called
fundamentalism (which, when all is said and done, usually refers to any sort
of passionate religious movement) is a rare, hard-to-explain thing. But in
fact it is not rare at all, neither if one looks at history, nor if one looks
around the contemporary world. On the contrary, what is rare is people who
think otherwise. Put simply: The difficult-to-understand phenomenon is not
Iranian mullahs but American university professors. (Would it, perhaps, be
worth a multi-million-dollar project to try to explain the latter group?)

The point of this little story is that the assumption that we live
in a secularized world is false: The world today, with some exceptions
attended to below, is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some
places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature written
by historians and social scientists over the course of the 1950s and
'60s, loosely labeled as "secularization theory", was
essentially mistaken. In my early work I contributed to this literature and
was in good company so doing - most sociologists of religion had similar
views. There were good reasons for holding these views at the time, and some
of these writings still stand up. But the core premise does not.

The key idea of secularization theory is simple and can be traced to
the Enlightenment: Modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion,
both in society and in the minds of individuals. It is precisely this key
idea that has turned out to be wrong. To be sure, modernization has had some
secularizing effects, more in some places than in others. But it has also
provoked powerful movements of counter-secularization. Also, secularization
on the societal level is not necessarily linked to secularization on the
level of individual consciousness. Thus, certain religious institutions have
lost power and influence in many societies, but both old and new religious
beliefs and practices have nevertheless continued in the lives of
individuals, sometimes taking new institutional forms and sometimes leading
to great explosions of religious fervor. Conversely, religiously-identified
institutions can play social or political roles even when very few people
believe or practice the religion supposedly represented by these
institutions. To say the least, the relation between religion and modernity
is rather complicated.

Rejection and Adaptation

The proposition that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of
religion is, in principle, "value-free." That is, it can be
affirmed both by people who think it is good news and by people who think
that it is very bad news indeed. Most Enlightenment thinkers and most
progressive-minded people ever since have tended toward the idea that
secularization is a good thing, at least insofar as it does away with
religious phenomena that are "backward", "superstitious",
or "reactionary" (a religious residue purged of these negative
characteristics may still be deemed acceptable). But religious people,
including those with very traditional or orthodox beliefs, have also affirmed
the modernity/secularity linkage, and have greatly bemoaned it. Some have
defined modernity as the enemy, to be fought whenever possible. Others have,
on the contrary, seen modernity as an invincible worldview to which religious
beliefs and practices should adapt themselves. In other words, rejection and
adaptation are two strategies open to religious communities in a world
understood to be secularized. As is always the case when strategies are based
on mistaken perception of the terrain, both strategies have had very doubtful
results.

It is possible, of course, to reject any number of modern ideas and
values theoretically, but to make this rejection stick in the lives of people
is much more difficult. To do that, one can try to take over society as a
whole and make one's counter-modern religion obligatory for everyone - a
difficult enterprise in most countries in the contemporary world. Franco
tried in Spain, and failed; the mullahs are still at it in Iran and a couple
of other places; in most of the world such exercises in religious conquest
are unlikely to succeed. And this unlikelihood does have to do with
modernization, which brings about very heterogeneous societies and a quantum
leap in intercultural communication, two factors favoring pluralism and not
favoring the establishment (or re-establishment) of religious monopolies.
Another form of rejection strategy is to create religious subcultures so
designed as to exclude the influences of the outside society. That is a more
promising exercise than religious revolution, but it too is fraught with
difficulty. Where it has taken root, modern culture is a very powerful force,
and an immense effort is required to maintain enclaves with an airtight
defense system. Ask the Amish in eastern Pennsylvania, or a Hasidic rabbi in
the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Notwithstanding the apparent power of modern secular culture,
secularization theory has been falsified even more dramatically by the
results of adaptation strategies attempted by religious institutions. If we
really lived in a highly secularized world, then religious institutions could
be expected to survive to the degree that they manage to adapt to secularity.
That, indeed, has been the empirical assumption of adaptation strategies.
What has in fact occurred is that, by and large, religious communities have
survived and indeed flourished to the degree that they have not tried to
adapt themselves to the alleged requirements of a secularized world. Put
simply, experiments with secularized religion have generally failed;
religious movements with beliefs and practices dripping with
"reactionary supernaturalism" (the kind utterly beyond the pale at
self-respecting faculty parties) have widely succeeded.

The struggle with modernity in the Roman Catholic Church nicely
illustrates the difficulties of various rejection and adaptation strategies.
In the wake of the Enlightenment and its multiple revolutions, the initial
response by the Church was militant and then defiant rejection. Perhaps the
most magnificent moment of that defiance came in 1870, when the First Vatican
Council solemnly proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope and the immaculate
conception of Mary, literally in the face of the Enlightenment about to
occupy Rome in the shape of the army of Victor Emmanuel I. The disdain was
mutual: The Roman monument to the Bersaglieri, the elite army units that
occupied the Eternal City in the name of the Italian Risorgimento, places the
heroic figure in his Bersaglieri uniform so that he is positioned with his
behind pointing exactly toward the Vatican. The Second Vatican Council,
almost a hundred years later, considerably modified this rejectionist stance,
guided as it was by the notion of aggiornamento - literally, bringing the
church "up-to-date" with the modern world. (I remember a
conversation I had with a Protestant theologian, whom I asked. what he
thought would happen at the Council, this before it had actually convened; he
replied that he didn't know, but that he was sure that they would not
read the minutes of the first Council meeting.)

The Second Vatican Council was supposed to open windows,
specifically the windows of the anti-secular Catholic subculture that had
been constructed when it became clear that the overall society could not be
reconquered. (In the United States this Catholic subculture was quite
impressive right up to the very recent past.) The trouble with opening
windows is that you cannot control what comes in through them, and a lot has
come in - indeed, the whole turbulent world of modern culture - that has been
very troubling to the Church. Under the current pontificate the Church has
been steering a nuanced course in between rejection and adaptation, with
mixed results in different countries.

If one looks at the international religious scene objectively, that
of the Roman Catholics as well as virtually all others, one must observe that
it is conservative or orthodox or traditionalist movements that are on the
rise almost everywhere. These movements, whatever adjective one may choose
for them, are precisely those that rejected an aggiornamento as defined by
progressive intellectuals. Conversely, religious movements and institutions
that have made great efforts to conform to a perceived modernity are almost
everywhere on the decline. In the United States this has been a much
commented-upon fact, exemplified by the decline of so-called mainline
Protestantism and the concomitant rise of Evangelicalism; but the United
States is by no means unusual in this. Nor is Protestantism.

The conservative thrust in the Roman Catholic church under John Paul
II has borne fruit in both the number of converts and in the renewed
enthusiasm among native Catholics, especially in non-Western countries.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, too, there occurred a remarkable
revival of the Orthodox Church in Russia.

The most rapidly growing Jewish groups, both in Israel and in the
diaspora, are Orthodox groups. There have been similarly vigorous upsurges of
conservative religion in all the other major religious communities - Islam,
Hinduism, Buddhism - as well as revival movements in smaller communities
(such as Shinto in Japan and Sikhism in India).

Of course, these developments differ greatly, not only in religious
content (which is obvious), but in their social and political implications.
What they have in common, though, is their unambiguously religious
inspiration. In their aggregate they provide a massive falsification of the
idea that modernization and secularization are cognate phenomena. Minimally,
one must note that counter-secularization is at least as important a
phenomenon in the contemporary world as secularization.

Two Revivals...

Both in the media and in scholarly publications these religious
movements are often subsumed under the category of
"fundamentalism." This is not a felicitous term, not only because
it carries a pejorative undertone, but because it derives from the history of
American Protestantism, where it has a specific reference that is distortive
if extended to other religious traditions. All the same, the term has some
suggestive use if one tries to explain the aforementioned developments: It
suggests a combination of several features - great religious passion, a
defiance of what others have defined as the Zeitgeist, and a return to
traditional sources of religious authority. These are indeed common features
across cultural boundaries. And they do reflect the presence of secularizing
forces, since they must be understood as a reaction against them. (In that
sense, at least, something of the old secularization theory may be said to
hold up, albeit in a rather back-handed way.) Clearly, one of the most
important topics for a sociology of contemporary religion is precisely this
interplay of secularizing and counter-secularizing forces. This is because
modernity, for fully understandable reasons, undermines all the old
certainties; uncertainty, in turn is a condition that many people find very
hard to bear; therefore, any movement (not only a religious one) that
promises to provide or to renew certainty has a ready market.

While the aforementioned common features are important, an analysis
of the social and political impact of the various religious upsurges must
take full account of their differences. This becomes clear when one looks at
what are arguably the two most dynamic religious upsurges in the world today,
the Islamic and the Evangelical ones. Comparison also underlines the weakness
of the category "fundamentalism" as applied to both.

The Islamic upsurge, because of its more immediately obvious
political ramifications, is the better known of the two. Yet it would be a
serious error to see it only through a political lens. It is an impressive
revival of emphatically religious commitments. And it is of vast geographical
scope, affecting every Muslim country from North Africa to Southeast Asia. It
continues to gain converts, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is
often in head-on competition with Christianity. It is becoming very visible
in the burgeoning Muslim communities in Europe and, to a much lesser extent,
in North America. Everywhere it is bringing about a restoration not only of
Islamic beliefs, but of distinctively Islamic lifestyles, which in many ways
directly contradict modern ideas - such as the relation of religion and the
state, the role of women, moral codes of everyday behavior and, last but not
least, the boundaries of religious and moral tolerance.

An important characteristic of the Islamic revival is that it is by
no means restricted to the less modernized or "backward" sectors of
society, as progressive intellectuals still like to think. On the contrary,
it is very strong in cities with a high degree of modernization, and in a
number of countries it is particularly visible among people with
Western-style higher education; in Egypt and Turkey, for example, it is often
the daughters of secularized professionals who are putting on the veil and
other accoutrements expressing so-called Islamic modesty.

Yet there are also very great differences. Even within the Middle
East, the Islamic heartland, there are both religiously and politically
important distinctions to be made between Sunni and Shi'a revivals -
Islamic conservatism means very different things in, say, Saudi Arabia and
Iran. As one moves away from the Middle East, the differences become even
greater. Thus in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, a
very powerful revival movement, the Nahdatul-Ulama, is avowedly pro-democracy
and pro-pluralism, the very opposite of what is commonly viewed as Muslim
"fundamentalism." Where the political circumstances allow it, there
is a lively discussion about the relationship of Islam to various modern
realities, and there are sharp disagreements between individuals who are
equally committed to a revitalized Islam. Still, for reasons deeply grounded
in the core of the tradition, it is probably fair to say that, on the whole,
Islam has had a difficult time coming to terms with key modern institutions -
such as pluralism, democracy, and the market economy.

The Evangelical upsurge is just as breathtaking in scope.
Geographically that scope is even wider than that of the Islamic revival. It
has gained huge numbers of converts in East Asia - in all the Chinese
communities (including, despite severe persecution, in mainland China) and in
South Korea, the Philippines, across the South Pacific, throughout
sub-Saharan Africa (where it is often synthesized with elements of
traditional African religion), and apparently in parts of ex-communist
Europe. But the most remarkable success has occurred in Latin America; it is
estimated that there are now between forty and fifty million Evangelical
Protestants south of the U.S. border, the great majority of them
first-generation Protestants.

The most numerous component within the Evangelical upsurge is
Pentecostal, combining Biblical orthodoxy and a rigorous morality with an
ecstatic form of worship and an emphasis on spiritual healing. Especially in
Latin America, conversion to Protestantism brings about a cultural
transformation - new attitudes toward work and consumption, a new educational
ethos, a violent rejection of traditional machismo (women play a key role in
the Evangelical churches). The origins of this worldwide Evangelical upsurge
are in the United States, from where the missionaries were first dispatched.
But it is very important to understand that virtually everywhere, and
emphatically in Latin America, the new Evangelicalism is thoroughly
indigenous and is no longer dependent on support from U.S. fellow-believers.
Indeed, Latin American Evangelicals have been sending missionaries to the
Hispanic community in this country, where there has been a comparable flurry
of conversions.

Needless to say, the religious contents of the Islamic and
Evangelical revivals are totally different. So are the social and political
consequences (of which more below). But the two developments also differ in
that the Islamic movement is occurring primarily in countries that are
already Muslim or among Muslim emigrants (as in Europe); by contrast, the
Evangelical movement is growing dramatically throughout the world in
countries where this type of religion was previously unknown or very
marginal.

. . . And Two Exceptions

The world today, then, is massively religious, and it is anything
but the secularized world that had been predicted (be it joyfully or
despondently) by so many analysts of modernity. There are two exceptions to
this proposition, one somewhat unclear, the other very obvious.

The first apparent exception is in Western Europe, where, if nowhere
else, the old secularization theory seems to hold. With increasing
modernization there has been an increase in the key indicators of
secularization: on the level of expressed beliefs (especially such as could
be called orthodox in Protestant or Catholic terms), and dramatically on the
level of church-related behavior (attendance at services of worship,
adherence to church-dictated codes of personal behavior-especially with
regard to sexuality, reproduction, and marriage), and finally, with respect
to recruitment to the clergy. These phenomena had been observed for a long
time in the northern countries of the continent; since the Second World War
they have quickly engulfed the south. Thus Italy and Spain have experienced a
rapid decline in church-related religion - as has Greece (thus undercutting
the claim of Catholic conservatives that Vatican II is to be blamed for the
decline). There is now a massively secular Euro-culture and what has happened
in the south can be simply described (though not thereby explained) as the
invasion of these countries by that culture. It is not fanciful to predict
that there will be similar developments in Eastern Europe, precisely to the
degree that these countries too will be integrated into the new Europe.

While these facts are not in dispute, a number of recent works in
the sociology of religion (notably in France, Britain, and Scandinavia) have
questioned the term "secularization" as applied to these
developments. There is now a body of data indicating strong survivals of
religion, most of it generally Christian in nature, despite the widespread
alienation from the organized churches. If the data hold up to scrutiny, a
shift in the institutional location of religion, rather than secularization,
would then be a more accurate description of the European situation. All the
same, Europe stands out as quite different from other parts of the world. It
certainly differs sharply from the religious situation in the United States.
One of the most interesting puzzles in the sociology of religion is why
Americans are so much more religious as well as more churchly than Europeans.

The other exception to the desecularization thesis is less
ambiguous: There exists an international subculture composed of people with
Western-type higher education, especially in the humanities and social
sciences, which is indeed secularized by any measure. This subculture is the
principal "carrier" of progressive, Enlightenment beliefs and
values. While the people in this subculture are relatively thin on the
ground, they are very influential, as they control the institutions that
provide the "official" definitions of reality (notably the
educational system, the media of mass communication, and the higher reaches
of the legal system). They are remarkably similar all over the world today as
they have been for a long time (though, as we have seen, there are also
defectors from this subculture, especially in the Muslim countries). Why it
is that people with this type of education should be so prone to
secularization is not entirely clear, but there is, without question, a
globalized elite culture. It follows, then, that in country after country
religious upsurges have a strongly populist character: Over and beyond the
purely religious motives, these are movements of protest and resistance
against a secular elite. The so-called "culture war" in the United
States emphatically shares this feature.

Questions and Answers

This somewhat breathless tour and horizon of the global religious
scene raises several questions: What are the origins of the worldwide
resurgence of religion? What is the likely future course of this religious
resurgence? Do resurgent religions differ in their critique of the secular
order? How is religious resurgence related to a number of issues not
ordinarily linked to religion? Let us take these questions in turn.

As to the origins of the worldwide resurgence of religion, two
possible answers have already been mentioned. The first is that modernity
tends to undermine the taken-for-granted certainties by which people lived
throughout most of history. This is an uncomfortable state of affairs, for
many an intolerable one, and religious movements that claim to give certainty
have great appeal by easing that discomfort. The second is that a purely
secular view of reality has its principal social location in an elite culture
that, not surprisingly, is resented by large numbers of people who are not
part of it but who nevertheless feel its influence (most troublingly, as
their children are subjected to an education that ignores or even directly
attacks their own beliefs and values). Religious movements with a strongly
anti-secular bent can therefore appeal to people with resentments that
sometimes have quite non-religious sources.

But there is yet another answer, which recalls my opening story
about certain American foundation officials worrying about
"fundamentalism." In one sense, there is nothing to explain here.
Strongly felt religion has always been around: what needs explanation is its
absence rather than its presence. Modern secularity is a much more puzzling
phenomenon than all these religious explosions - and the University of
Chicago is a more interesting topic for the sociology of religion than are
the Islamic schools of Qom. In other words, at one level the phenomena under
consideration simply serve to demonstrate continuity in the place of religion
in human experience.

As to the likely future course of this religious resurgence, it
would make little sense to venture a prognosis with regard to the entire
global scene, given the considerable variety of important religious movements
in the contemporary world. Predictions, if one dares to make them at all,
will be more useful if applied to much narrower situations. One, though, can
be made with some assurance: There is no reason to think that the world of
the twenty-first century will be any less religious than the world is today.

There is, it must be said, a minority of sociologists of religion
who have been trying to salvage the old secularization theory by what may be
called the last-gasp thesis: Modernization does secularize, and movements
like the Islamic and the Evangelical ones represent last-ditch defenses by
religion that cannot last. Eventually, secularity will triumph - or, to put
it less respectfully, eventually Iranian mullahs, Pentecostal preachers, and
Tibetan lamas will all think and act like professors of literature at
American universities. This thesis is singularly unpersuasive.

Nonetheless, one will have to speculate very differently regarding
different sectors of the religious scene. For example, the most militant
Islamic movements will have difficulty maintaining their present stance
vis-a-vis modernity should they succeed in taking over the governments of
their countries (as, it seems, is already happening in Iran). It is also
unlikely that Pentecostalism, as it exists today among mostly poor and
uneducated people, will retain its present religious and moral
characteristics unchanged as many of these people experience upward social
mobility (this has already been observed extensively in the United States).
Generally, many of these religious movements are linked to non-religious
forces of one sort or another, and the future course of the former will be at
least partially determined by the course of the latter. Thus in the United
States, for instance, the future course of militant Evangelicalism will be
different if some of its causes succeed - or continue to be frustrated-in the
political and legal arenas.

Finally, in religion as in every other area of human endeavor,
individual personalities play a much larger role than most social scientists
and historians are willing to concede. Thus there might have been an Islamic
revolution in Iran without the Ayatollah Khomeini, but it would probably have
looked quite different. No one can predict the appearance of charismatic
figures who will launch powerful religious movements in places where no one
expects them. Who knows - perhaps the next religious upsurge in America will
occur among disenchanted postmodernist academics!

Do the resurgent religions differ in their critique of the secular
order? Yes, of course they do, depending on their respective belief systems.
Cardinal Ratzinger and the Dalai Lama will be troubled by different aspects
of contemporary secular culture. What both, however, will agree upon is the
shallowness of a culture that tries to get by without any transcendent points
of reference. And there, certainly, they will have good reasons for
criticism.

The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends the
restricted space of empirical existence in this world, has been a perennial
feature of humanity. (This assertion is not a theological statement but an
anthropological one - an agnostic or even an atheist philosopher may well
agree with it.) It would require something close to a mutation of the species
to finally extinguish this impulse. The more radical thinkers of the
Enlightenment, and their more recent intellectual descendants, hoped for
something like such a mutation, of course. Thus far this has not happened and
it is unlikely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future. The critique of
secularity common to all the resurgent movements is that human existence
bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable condition.

To the extent that secularity today has a specifically modern form
(there were earlier forms, for example, in versions of Confucianism and
Hellenistic culture), the critique of secularity also entails a critique of
at least these aspects of modernity. Beyond that, however, different
religious movements differ in their relation to modernity.

As noted, an argument can be made that the Islamic resurgence has a
strong tendency toward a negative view of modernity; in places it is
downright anti-modern or counter-modernizing (as in its view on the role of
women). By contrast, the Evangelical resurgence is positively modernizing in
most places where it occurs, clearly so in Latin America. The new
Evangelicals throw aside many of the traditions that have been obstacles to
modernization (machismo, for one, also the subservience to hierarchy that has
been endemic to Iberian Catholicism), and their churches encourage values and
behavior patterns that contribute to modernization. Just to take one
important case in point: In order to participate fully in the life of their
congregations, Evangelicals will want to read the Bible and to be able to
join in the discussion of congregational affairs that are largely in the
hands of lay persons (indeed, largely in the hands of women). The desire to
read the Bible encourages literacy, and, beyond this, a positive attitude
toward education and self-improvement. The running of local churches by lay
persons necessitates training in various administrative skills, including the
conduct of public meetings and the keeping of financial accounts. It is not
fanciful to suggest that in this way Evangelical congregations serve
(inadvertently, to be sure) as schools for democracy and for social mobility.

How does the religious resurgence relate to a number of issues that
are not usually linked to religion? First let us take international politics.
Here one comes up head on against the thesis, eloquently proposed by Samuel
Huntington, to the effect that, with the end of the Cold War, international
affairs will be affected by a "clash of civilizations" rather than
by ideological conflicts. There is something to be said for this thesis. The
great ideological conflict that animated the Cold War is certainly dormant
for the moment, though I, for one, would not bet on its final demise. Nor can
one be sure that new and different ideological conflicts may not arise in the
future. Indeed, to the extent that nationalism is an ideology (more
accurately, each nationalism has its own ideology), ideology is alive and
well in a long list of countries.

It is also plausible that, in the absence of the overarching
confrontation between Soviet communism and the American-led West, cultural
animosities suppressed during the Cold War period are resurfacing. Some of
these animosities have themselves taken on an ideological form - as in the
assertion of a distinctive Asian identity by a number of governments and
intellectual groups in East and Southeast Asia. This particular ideology has
become especially visible in debates over the allegedly
ethnocentric/Eurocentric character of human rights as propagated by the
United States and other Western governments and non-governmental
organizations. But it would probably be an exaggeration to see these debates
as signaling a clash of civilizations. The closest thing to a religiously
defined clash of civilizations would come about if the radical Islamic
interpretation of the world came to be established within a wider spectrum of
Muslim countries, and actually became the basis of their foreign policies. As
yet, this has not happened.

Religion in World Politics

To assess the role of religion in international politics, it would
be useful to distinguish between political movements that are genuinely
inspired by religion and those that use religion as a convenient legitimation
for political agendas based on non-religious interests. Such a distinction is
difficult but not impossible. Thus there is no reason to doubt that the
suicide bombers of the Islamic Hamas movement truly believe in the religious
motives they avow. By contrast, there is good reason to doubt that the three
parties involved in the Bosnian conflict, which is commonly represented as a
clash between religions, are really inspired by religious ideas. I think it
was P.J. O'Rourke who observed that these three parties are of the same
race, speak the same language, and are distinguished only by their religion -
in which none of them believe. The same skepticism about the religious nature
of an allegedly religious conflict is expressed in the joke from Northern
Ireland (which also worked perfectly in the context of the Lebanese civil
war): A man walks down a dark street in Belfast, when a gunman jumps out of a
doorway, holds a gun to his head, and asks: "Are you Protestant or
Catholic?" The man stutters, "Well, actually I'm an
atheist." "Ah yes", says the gunman, "But are you a
Protestant or a Catholic atheist?"

It would be very nice if one could say that religion is everywhere a
force for peace. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While it is difficult
to pinpoint a frequency distribution, very probably religion much more often
fosters war, both between and within nations, rather than peace. If so, that
is hardly new in history. Religious institutions and movements are fanning
wars and civil wars on the Indian subcontinent, in the Balkans, in the Middle
East, and in Africa. Occasionally, religious institutions do try to resist
warlike policies or to mediate between conflicting parties. The Vatican
mediated successfully in some international disputes in Latin America. There
have been religiously inspired peace movements in several countries
(including the United States, during the Vietnam War). Both Protestant and
Catholic clergy have tried to mediate the conflict in Northern Ireland, with
notable lack of success. But it is probably a mistake to focus simply on the
actions of formal religious institutions or groups. There may be a diffusion
of religious values in a society that could have peace-prone consequences
even in the absence of formal actions by church bodies. For example, some
analysts have argued that the wide diffusion of Christian values played a
mediating role in the process that ended the apartheid regime in South
Africa, despite the fact that the churches themselves were mostly polarized
between the two sides of the conflict (at least until the last few years of
the regime, when the Dutch Reformed Church reversed its position on
apartheid).

Relatedly, a religious resurgence may well have important
implications for economic development. The basic text on the relation between
religion and economic development is, of course, Max Weber's The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Scholars have been arguing
over the thesis of this book for over ninety years. However one comes out on
this (I happen to be an unreconstructed Weberian), it is clear that some
values foster modern economic development more than others. Something like
Weber's "Protestant ethic" is probably functional in an early
phase of capitalist growth - an ethic, whether religiously inspired or not,
that values personal discipline, hard work, frugality, and a respect for
learning.

The new Evangelicalism in Latin America exhibits these values in
virtually crystalline purity. Conversely, Iberian Catholicism, as it was well
established in Latin America, clearly does not foster such values. But
religious traditions can change. Spain experienced a remarkably successful
period of economic development beginning in the waning years of the Franco
regime, and one of the important factors was. the influence of Opus Dei,
which combined rigorous theological orthodoxy with market-friendly openness
in economic matters. Islam, by and large, has difficulties with a modern
market economy - especially with modern banking - yet Muslim emigrants have
done remarkably well in a number of countries (for instance, in sub-Saharan
Africa), and there is a powerful Islamic movement in Indonesia - the
aforementioned Nahdatul-Ulama - that might yet play a role analogous to that
of Opus Dei in the Catholic world. For years now, too, there has been an
extended debate over the part played by Confucian-inspired values in the
economic success stories of East Asia; if one is to credit the
"post-Confucian thesis" (and also allow that Confucianism is a
religion), then here would be a very important religious contribution to
economic development.

One morally troubling aspect of this matter is that values
functional at one period of economic development may not be functional at
another. The values of the "Protestant ethic", or a functional
equivalent thereof, are probably essential during the phase that Wait Rostow
called "the take-off." It is not at all clear that this is the case
in a later phase. Much less austere values may be more functional in the
so-called post-industrial economies of Europe, North America, and East Asia.
Frugality, however admirable from a moral viewpoint, may now actually be a
vice, economically speaking. Undisciplined hedonists have a hard time
climbing out of primitive poverty but, if they are bright enough, they can do
very well in the high-tech, knowledge-driven economies of the advanced
societies.

Finally, there is the effect of the religious resurgence on human
rights and social justice worldwide. Religious institutions have, of course,
made many statements on human rights and social justice. Some of these have
had important political consequences, as in the civil rights struggle in the
United States or in the collapse of communist regimes in Europe. But, as has
already been mentioned, there are different religiously articulated views
about the nature of human rights. The same goes for ideas about social
justice; what is justice to some groups is gross injustice to others.
Sometimes it is very clear that positions taken by religious groups on such
matters are based on a religious rationale, as with the principled opposition
to abortion and contraception by the Roman Catholic Church. At other times,
though, positions on social justice, even if legitimated by religious
rhetoric, reflect the location of the religious functionaries in this or that
network of non-religious social classes and interests. To stay with the same
example, most of the positions taken by American Catholic institutions on
social justice issues other than those relating to sexuality and reproduction
fall into this category.

This mixed analysis is emblematic of what must be our general
conclusion. Both those who have great hopes for the role of religion in the
affairs of this world and those who fear this role must be disappointed by
the factual evidence, which, in the final analysis, points in not just one
but several directions simultaneously. In assessing this role, there is no
alternative to a nuanced, case-by-case approach. But one statement can be
made with great confidence: Those who neglect religion in their analyses of
contemporary affairs do so at great peril.

Peter L. Berger is professor of sociology and director of the
Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University. This essay
is adapted from a lecture given at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies.

Abstract:

The 'secularization theory' of the 1950s and the 1960s
that was proposed by historians and social scientists, which held that
modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion in the society and
in individuals, has been proven false. Although modernization may have had
some secularizing effects in some areas, it has also given rise to
counter-secularization. This means that some old and new religious beliefs
and practices continue in the lives of individuals. Meanwhile, religiously
identified institutions can motivate socially or politically despite their
having very limited memberships.